navigation

4.24.2013

Travel Log: Living in a Mud Hut (2009)

In case you missed it, a couple months ago, I chronicled one of the coolest experiences of my life: a weekend spent exploring the sub-Saharan wildlife at the Queen Elizabeth Wildlife Preserve in Uganda. Check it out, here.

Today, I'm traveling back in time not long before my safari weekend, to my Spring Break spent living in a mud hut. Seriously. Click on each day if you want to read the posts that accompany each picture. They're much more detailed than I could ever hope to be, four years later.

Four years later, this Spring Break seems about a million years ago. One of the things I'm most frequently asked about my trip was how in the heck I killed that chicken. Me, the girl, who will rant and rave for hours about the inhumane slaughter of animals in U.S. factory farms. To explain my justification out of the Ugandan context doesn't make sense to most people, but I'll do my best.

1. In Uganda, you slaughter your own meal with your own hands because that's just what you do. You don't open up a refrigerator and decide between a million options for dinner. I slaughtered the chicken because it was my sustenance.

2. The beef I have with factory farming (pun intended) is that it is wasteful and it completely removes us from the food we eat. We have no idea who raised the animal we're about to ingest, nor what hormones and feed it was given, nor how it was processed and packaged. It's strange and unnatural for us to identify beef and pork as the ground up, styrofoam-ed mystery that it is. To have a part in the slaughter of the animal I in turn ate for dinner just seemed so beautiful and natural to me.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it! Please feel free to pepper me with other questions about my rural Ugandan living :)

2 comments:

I can totally understand what you're saying (although I've been a vegetarian for17 years, so I don't think I'd be slaughtering any chickens myself), but it's a bit sad that people don't associate the food they eat with the place it comes from.

There was that show with Jamie Oliver awhile go where he took veggies to classrooms in the US and kids didn't know what a potato was or what a tomato was because they'd only seen them in their ketchup or french fry variety! APPALLING.